Panel wipe and sealant

[RippyD]

You do understand that naked paint will bead water very well, right? The presence of a wax or sealant is not needed for water to bead. All you need is a perfectly clean surface.

I will check WaxMode's chanel. Thanks for the tip.

I'm not checking beading, only sheeting. I haven't seen clean paint they way a sealant or coating will. The downside is that I'm likely saying these have failed too early. A lack of sheeting may not be a good measure of when a sealant stops working. But it's the one I can measure visually.

[Calendyr]

This is exactly the reason I'm doing this testing - there's a ton of opinion on this topic without any real evidence either way.

The Dupli-Color product you're using is 95% acetone, so I'd put it in the same category as the alcohol based cleaners. I'd guess the other 5% is water. This may be a 4th category of panel wipe main ingredients since it's a ketone rather than an alcohol (I don't recall the key differences between the two). It's miscible in water, unlike petroleum based solvents. I'll try acetone as well and see how it does.

Hoping to get testing done today. Missed Saturday, was too cold yesterday, snowing this morning. Will see how this afternoon looks.

Very interesting. i will have to check the price for both Acetone and G&WR. Might be much cheaper to mix Acetone with ONR and use that as a prep.

[ski2]

Wouldn't Acetone potentially damage trim/plastics???

[Calendyr]

Yes. Acetone can melt plastic. So you should not use it on trims or plastic parts.

[PaulMys]

Yes. Acetone can melt plastic. So you should not use it on trims or plastic parts.

Exactly. It wont melt all forms of plastic, but I would never want to find out which forms on my own vehicle.

[Mike@ShineStruck]

I coating prep o think would actually dissolve a sealant based paste wax(Autoglym HD or similar) would be Gtechnic panel prep

[RippyD]

Did some testing today. My camera lost some pics so not as well documented as I wanted.

I tried 3 other panel wipe products today. Recall that the front of the hood was N-914 at prep dilution (8:1). The other 3 are Gyeon Prep, Naptha, and Acetone.


The product to panel wipe matrix looks like this:


Before using any products I waterless washed and hit it with the hose. You can see the Aquawax is slowing downs some relative to the others. We had heavy rain over the last couple of days.


Here's how it looked after using the panel wipes. I decided to waterless wash after using the panel wipe products in in case any of the solvent-based ones left any residue behind. You can see that the Aquawax has slowed down considerably as of the others were acetone and naptha were used. These did clear, after a few more seconds, but are obviously slower. The PNS sections with alcohol and soap based wipes are doing well.



Dried, did a second panel wipe, waterless washed, and hit it with the hose. You can see the alcohol wiped areas are slowing down.


Third (dried, panel wipe, waterless):


Fourth (dried, panel wipe, waterless). You can see that the alcohol wiped areas are starting to slow down.


For the 5th one I decided I needed a control panel with no product to compare to, so I polished the PNS/Alcohol section (UP, prep polish, Gyeon prep). I also panel wipde the front section of the hood again to see if another pass with N-914 had any impact.


The alcohol, naptha, and acetone sections are shedding water no faster than the polished section. The N-914 areas with PNS and FK 1000 are still doing fine. The acetone and naptha sections slowed down considerably after 1 cleaning. The alcohol started slowing after 2, although PNS held up better than FK 1000 to alcohol wiping.

Panel wipe does appear to impact sealants pretty significantly. I would rate acetone as the fastest, then naptha, then alcohol. N-914 seems to have limited impact on a more durable sealant.

[DetailZeus]

[...] I decided to waterless wash after using the panel wipe products in in case any of the solvent-based ones left any residue behind. [...]

Panel wipe does appear to impact sealants pretty significantly. I would rate acetone as the fastest, then naptha, then alcohol. N-914 seems to have limited impact on a more durable sealant.

Personally I would expect a waterless wash to leave behind more residue than a solvent wipe. However thank you for doing this test, very informative!

[RippyD]

Personally I would expect a waterless wash to leave behind more residue than a solvent wipe. However thank you for doing this test, very informative!

My thinking was that anything left by the solvents would be oil based so the the soap would remove it and the water would remove the soap. My concern was any oil-based product left appearing to repel water. Not sure that makes sense, and I expect the naptha and acetone evaporate pretty completely anyway.

EDIT: Weather permitting I'll do another pass with the panel wipes today and then do a waterless wash on 50% of each of them to see if there's a visible difference.

[PiPUK]

I can't help but think about the possibility of "clogging"; are you sure the N-914 is removing the Aquawax, or is it simply bonding to it and "clogging" the beading/sheeting performance?

Remember we went through this a few years ago with Swanicyouth and PiPUK (what ever happened to him?) with Dawn and APC washing which seemed to remove sealants, only to do an IPA wipe which removed surfactant residues and restored the beading. Which opened up a whole can of worms about sealant bonding to "bare" surfaces if we weren't really getting bare surfaces to begin with.

I am still around, but not often!

It actually is great to see that this all stuck with you guys! One of the reasons I stopped posting so much was that these attempts to educate, on the UK forum scene, resulted in outright unpleasantness. Suffice it to say, many UK detailers are still stuck with the idea that dawn (or our equivalent - fairy) strips everything and leads to appreciable corrosion. Ho hum.

Anyhow, having done a bit of googling on N-914, I would say that there must be a risk of the same occurring. I cannot find a safety data sheet but the spiel clearly says it contains surfactants. They say that these are not substantive but that is relative. By their very nature, surfactants have two 'ends', one of these likes water and the other oils (which is how they work). Fundamentally a wax is rather like an oil, albeit longer chain and different properties. Surfactants will try to stick to them and the other end will be dangling up in the air - the water loving bit (!) - which will encourage water to stick and thus no beading. Sealants are typically just clever silicone based polymers which could easily be descibed as having oily characteristics and thus a surfactant can easily stick. This is the case for any surfactant. There are certain classes of surfactants which are specifically substantive and these give much more pronounced modifications and are based, mostly, on their electrical charge being opposite (and thus attracted) to the surface itself.

Summary - if you have a wax or sealant, a surfactant products will inevitably leave a degree of surfactant residue, unless you wash it off (and hence the previous tests where we did IPA wipes). In the absence of a thorough rinse, as per the use here, a surfactant residue is inevitable.

So I wouldn't both using this product for any sort of scientific testing, the results can immediately be questioned.

As discussed by others, you need a totally volatile product. IPA and alcohols are only going to do light oils. Mineral spirits or hydrocarbon panel wipes are the way and you should avoid water based panel wipes - these have a place but they aren't here.

Our experience is that we make automotive products (yes, we are one of the companies who actually formulates and manufacture). We would test hundreds of sealants and waxes during developments and thus need to strip them. Years of experience has led us to conclude that chemical methods don't work reliably. Lower quality products can sometimes be removed, old and tired applications can sometimes be removed but a fresh application of a good sealant is typically not coming off without multiple applications or extended contact time. In the UK we would have a lot of tar on our roads so tar removers are a norm. In contrast to the products you guys often get, these will often be white spirits and xylene based - really strong stuff. Certainly when against our sealants (and I mean traditional type, not nano/silica etc), you cannot be confident of removal. As such, when we are testing, we rely on an abrasive polish and a DA machine.